Image representation using block compressive sensing for compression applications

•A new image representation scheme using block compressive sensing (CS) for encrypted image compression is proposed.•A coefficient randomly permutation (CRP) technique in DCT domain is proposed.•A new BCS adaptive sampling (AS) scheme is proposed. The emerging compressive sensing (CS) theory has pointed us a promising way of developing novel efficient data compression techniques, although it is proposed with original intention to achieve dimension-reduced sampling for saving data sampling cost. However, the non-adaptive projection representation for the natural images by conventional CS (CCS) framework may lead to an inefficient compression performance when comparing to the classical image compression standards such as JPEG and JPEG 2000. In this paper, two simple methods are investigated for the block CS (BCS) with discrete cosine transform (DCT) based image representation for compression applications. One is called coefficient random permutation (CRP), and the other is termed adaptive sampling (AS). The CRP method can be effective in balancing the sparsity of sampled vectors in DCT domain of image, and then in improving the CS sampling efficiency. The AS is achieved by designing an adaptive measurement matrix used in CS based on the energy distribution characteristics of image in DCT domain, which has a good effect in enhancing the CS performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed methods are efficacious in reducing the dimension of the BCS-based image representation and/or improving the recovered image quality. The proposed BCS based image representation scheme could be an efficient alternative for applications of encrypted image compression and/or robust image compression.